


AU Oneshots, or, "F**k You I Am Writing All Of These"

by airdeari



Series: self-indulgent aoilight within [18]
Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Drabble Collection, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2018-10-02 14:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10219865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: follow me on twitter @meataphor to suggest silly aoilight prompts and apparently my garbage brain will compulsively write it even though i said i would go to bed an hour ago





	1. Denny's - @psicaramel

I could feel the grime on my teeth as the last of the sugary shit passed through my throat. My hand shook as I crushed the fourth—fifth?—empty can in my palm. It shook worse after I flung the aluminum wreck across the asphalt. It couldn't have been more than an hour ago since my phone died reading 2:32 A.M., but this week was the longest goddamn week of my life and I couldn't wait anymore. Every inch of my body hurt as I trudged past the stinking dumpster where the shadows got weird, and it wasn’t just the caffeine rush. 

“Someone wants to stretch the boundaries of a liminal space,” he said.

I always heard him before I saw him. Maybe it's supposed to be symbolic or poetic or something. He can never see me.

“Fuck you,” I grumbled into another world or some shit.


	2. If you wanted - @TheRogueheart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ordinarily I wouldn't triple-post fics like this but I'm trying to meet an SLA. I said I'd get it done in 24 hours and? I was right.

The weird thing about plotting revenge while closing a stable time loop is that there’s no way you can make a mistake. Every moment is predestined. If you follow the timeline, nothing will go wrong. That said, we still literally rehearsed this part of the plan because it was so batshit crazy what we had to pull off.

Everyone split up to search their rooms in the long hall by the hospital room. As a little insurance for time’s sake, we had the things inside lightly ransacked, to give everyone a little more work in their investigation. Once we saw Light choose a door, Akane and I each entered our prepared rooms. I picked out the dresser drawer with my supplies, threw the robe and gas mask over my head while I kicked off my shoes, and stepped outside when I heard her fingers tap against my door. She suppressed the sound of the giggle that played across her lips, mouthing, “Good luck.”

We had to pull off Light Field’s clothes.

The Soporil can and I went in at the same time. We had experimented with Akane tossing in the can first, then getting me, then I’d pick up the body after the drugs kicked in, but she had the REDs to fix. We could risk someone coming out of their room in the time it took her to grab the hardware, grab the Soporil, toss in the smoke grenade, knock on my door, and run to the hospital room. Even when she took off her shoes for the run in our practice sessions, I could hear her pounding down the hallway. It was safer for me to dress myself in robes to keep the stink of Soporil off of my clothes and a gas mask to keep it out of my head, and knock out the dude in person.

Through the white haze of the smoke and the reddish tint of my goggles, I saw Light’s legs begin to bend. There was plenty of time for this part. I didn’t need to rush, especially now that we set it up so I had a head start in getting what I needed from him. Maybe it was just nerves that made me dart up behind him as he fell backwards.

He knocked the breath out of me when his shoulders hit my chest. I’ll blame the gas mask for why I couldn’t breathe in after that.

I still felt a rushing panic as I hooked my arms under his and lowered him safely to the ground. I didn’t take the jacket off before I scrambled through the buttons on his white shirt; it was easier for me to take them both off together, and it was easy for me to put them back onto Nijisaki at the same time.

We practiced this. I had plenty of time. But the dinky mannequin wasn’t as warm and soft as this, and it didn’t have pale blonde hair getting thicker as my fingers trailed down his—

Ha ha, okay, Light Field was shirtless in my lap and I was about to undo his fly, holy fucking shit.

As soon as I pulled down the zipper under not one, but _two_ buttons, _and_ one of those weird metal hooks inside the overlapping parts of the waistband, I yanked the ends of his dress shirt out of his pants. The muted blue of his boxer briefs poked out of his open—

There was no safe place to look. The tops of his hips and the lower edges of his ribs jutted out from his pale chest as I maneuvered him out of his shirt and jacket. His arms were thin, but something about the way they got thicker and softer at the shoulder made it painful to look at him. God, his fucking collarbones. His…

His face.

The time seemed so stretched, I was sure it had been long enough for the gas to knock him out, especially in a place as confined as this. But maybe it wasn’t long enough, and maybe all that rushing was not only unnecessary, but also a _really bad idea_.

It was weak, but Light was definitely smiling.

“You know,” he slurred, “Aoi…”

One, Light should never have remembered me because he’s blind and the last time he heard my voice, I was a fifteen-year-old pipsqueak with an emphasis on the squeak. Two, Light shouldn’t have even known who was in this room with him, Santa _or_ Aoi, because I didn’t even _speak_ , and, in case he forgot, he’s fucking _blind_.

“If you wanted to strip me,” he said, trying to laugh even as his voice faded into a whisper, “you could’ve just asked.”

His body got heavier and his head rolled forward as his consciousness finally gave out.

 

* * *

 

Akane was waiting inside her room at the drop-off point for Light’s clothes, which meant she had restarted the REDs without a hitch, or maybe I had taken a little longer than I thought with my unexpected extra step in the procedure. She smiled at the sight of Light cradled in my arms.

“You even dressed him,” she cooed, pointing at the black robe.

My mouth couldn’t figure out whether I wanted to fucking die, to fucking kill her, or to fucking kill him, so it just said, “I’m gonna fucking,” and then I left.

The robe helped, but I could still see his collarbones.


	3. are we - @trashkeys

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have in fact been informed that the reason for my inability to remember whether this plot belonged to Snow or Kit is because I combined their ideas and smushed them together into one terrible ficlet. I still stand by my statement that it's cuter to have Snow's handle as the suggesty because it's representing all of my friends and it's cute
> 
> (beth ur up next)

Aoi turned the paper ticket over and over in his hands as he sat on his beaten suitcase, burrowing his cheeks deeper into his scarf with every warm breath. It was like holding an ice cube: if it spent too long touching his skin, it would start to burn. The ticket was not stolen, he kept trying to convince himself. It was purchased for him, and he would have been riding the train today no matter what.

His hands still felt grimy from when they had sifted through Mrs. Field’s purse by her cellphone’s flashlight, opened her wallet, and taken one of the four paper slips.

What Aoi had in his suitcase was what he had put in it when they last made this trek to his old apartment: the bare essentials he could pack before he could no longer see straight through the silent tears in his eyes. Mrs. Field sounded so pleased as she complimented the tidiness of the apartment, but her eyes were haunted by the thought of a boy some months younger than her own son having to keep his own apartment, by the shelves that were empty when they were not full of the trademarks of poverty: bargain brands, beans and rice, ugly photo frames and cheap incense at the sorry excuse for an altar for his parents.

The thought of keeping one for Akane made the tears build up. The thought of lighting a match before her face made him cringe even now.

The plan was to clear out the rest of the apartment today. The furniture they would leave—Mrs. Field had talked out an arrangement with the landlord, whom Aoi could not even look in the eye—but everything else they would collect into boxes or move into the trash. Light relayed the message that his mother would gladly pack up everything in Akane’s room by herself if Aoi was not ready to sift through it yet. Aoi had gone silent after that proposal, to which Light shrugged and said he could decide when they arrived.

Aoi came to his decision while failing to sleep through his third night in their home. He could not stay there any longer. He felt like an ugly skin graft on the surface of their pleasant life, his scar tissue jutting out where it would not assimilate. Every smile that perfect little family poured onto him only fed into his growing guilt.

At three-forty-seven in the morning, he stopped pretending to sleep, shut the suitcase he had never brought himself to unpack, crept out into the street, and walked for four hours until he made it to the train station. He had missed the previous train by about five minutes and spent the next twenty-seven holding his ticket like he should have been holding a phone if he were a normal fifteen-year-old kid with a life and some money and some friends.

He looked up, hypervigilant, when he heard the murmur in the station rise louder and ripple towards his platform. He had traced every set of footsteps that came within his field of vision or caught his ears, and these were different. Someone was frantic.

A tall, lean, ash-blond boy wearing an unbuttoned navy coat with an empty left sleeve cut through the crowd, sticking out like a sore thumb. He marched across the platform with a snarl on his lips, hair tucked behind his ears to listen.

Holding his breath, Aoi sank deeper against the wall. Of course they would know where he had gone. One of the tickets to his hometown was missing. They were not idiots. Light, for his part, was frustratingly clever.

Light was walking straight towards the tracks at the edge of the platform and he showed no signs of slowing.

With a pound of his heart, Aoi started forward, knocking over his suitcase, just before Light reached the rubber strip with the raised bumps and gave a frown at his feet, just before a woman shrieked, “ _Light!_ ” just before Mrs. Field herself came running in, throwing her arms around her son and dragging him back from the platform’s edge. Light gave her his usual annoyed grimace and shrugged her off immediately, yelling, “I know,” over the terrified scolding she was trying to give him. Clover came wandering in behind, gazing around the platform with her big, green eyes.

Aoi reached behind him for a hood that his jacket did not have. He raised his hands in a futile attempt to cover his conspicuous white hair. Clover caught his eye before he could look away, and then she was tugging on Light’s limp sleeve and pointing.

Aoi stared at the smears of mud on the tiles between his feet and wondered if he could die.

“Aoi,” Light exhaled.

The tips of Light’s sneakers came into view. Aoi dragged his feet back, and lowered his head even further.

“Aoi, what’s going on.”

“Aoi, honey?” There was Mrs. Field’s syrupy sweet voice that Aoi could never read as anything but forced sympathy. “What’s wrong? What are you doing here?”

“We were s’posed to go _together_ , Aoi,” Clover said, as if perhaps he had misunderstood the plan when they discussed it over dinner last night.

“Aoi.”

Light’s hand felt like pure pain when it settled against Aoi’s shoulder. Aoi wriggled out of his touch, squirming back against the wall where he wanted to make his home.

“Why are you doing this?”

He had missed the previous train by about five minutes, but that had been almost conscious. The clock outside the bank had shown him the time and he knew he could make it if he rushed, so instead he set his suitcase down and took a short rest from walking those sleepy streets.

“Do you want to go home?”

“I dunno.”

He curled up into himself, wrapping his hands up over his head as he doubled over. Everything faded into a blur of words spoken by others, spoken by himself, running through his head. _I dunno. What do you want. Why did you come here all alone. I dunno. I dunno. I dunno._

When it got too loud in his head, sometimes she would start screaming.

Clover cheered when she got to sit in the front seat. Light sat to Aoi’s left, holding out his hand in the small space between their seats. Aoi buckled in when Mrs. Field told him to, pulled his knees up to his face, and dissociated.

He felt like a coward for running. He felt like a coward for staying.

Maybe he was just a coward, and nothing he did could change that.

 

* * *

 

Mrs. Field was eyeing the bags under Aoi’s eyes when she held the front door open and softly said, “Why don’t you go back to sleep? I could wake you up whenever you like. Before lunch, or before dinner, whenever you like.”

“Before dinner, thanks,” replied Light in deadpan.

“Light, I was talking to—”

“I’m sorry, any conversation about naps automatically involves me and my disordered circadian rhythms by default.”

A little wrinkle of worry never left her brow, and Aoi was starting to grow sure that Light was the one who had dug that furrow. “Do you want me to call Dr.—?”

“Yes, and have him once again ignore anything I tell him and find a reason to put me on yet another medication with drowsiness as a side-effect,” Light said as he trudged up the stairs to his room. “I’m sure that will fix things.”

Every bitter word Light lobbed at his mother left a bad taste in Aoi’s mouth. He was still too disconnected from his body to speak in protest, to even make a face. His legs shuffled up the stairs to where things would be quiet.

Light looked up from peeling off his socks when he heard Aoi at the door. His room was dry, both in humidity, from the heater kicking into overdrive on this chilly November morning, and in décor. The colors were flat. Nothing hung on the walls. Light’s small habitual paths were carved into the dust. He never made his bed, or closed his closet doors, or his dresser drawers, or his hamper, into which he pitched his white socks stained grey from the insides of his black sneakers.

“It’s… bright out, isn’t it?” he said. “Does my room have curtains?”

Aoi nodded. He knew Light could not see it, but he could not get even a grunt of affirmation out of his throat. Instead, he crossed the room and loudly drew the curtains across the rod.

“Does that make it dark enough to sleep for you?” Light asked.

These were all yes-or-no questions. All Aoi had to do was say yes, or no, or make any kind of sound at all.

“Are you alright?” Light murmured.

This time Aoi did not even know whether the answer was yes or no. Light stopped asking questions when he heard Aoi flop down on the cot beside his bed.

He made the mistake of thinking it might be easy to fall asleep after a sleepless night upon several sleepless nights followed by an exhausting kind of panic attack in a public train station. As soon as the thought formed, his brain was a growing pressure on the rest of the body, telling him that time spent sleeping was time wasted, that he should be doing something.

He considered the dust in the room, but not a second later, Light started softly snoring.

With some semblance of conviction, he crept out from under the blankets and tiptoed out the door. It dissolved when he found himself in the dark hallway, inundated by the sounds of Light’s mother puttering about the kitchen, of Clover’s cartoons playing on the TV, of lives going on around him in which he did not belong. It was this nagging feeling that made him kick himself to the curb this morning in an attempt to finally disappear.

“Aoi, do you need anything?” Mrs. Field asked when Aoi ended up in the kitchen, barely sparing him a glance over her shoulder as she sliced a raw chicken breast into strips. “Something to drink? Did you want breakfast?”

On the counter beside her cutting board, and spread out across the kitchen table, were bowls, spices, bagged vegetables, and a pristine recipe book struggling to stay open against a spine that had not been worn down.

“Can I help?” Aoi mumbled.

She gave him so many kind, but pitying smiles. “Oh, no, that’s alright, I’m just getting things ready for a stew,” she insisted. “Go on upstairs. This is nothing.”

“Please,” he said so softly that he was not sure she would hear it.

Her hands slowed to a stop, then she glanced back over her shoulder again. “Do you want to cut some vegetables for me?” she asked.

With an eager nod, he darted to the sink to give his hands a quick scrub while Mrs. Field pulled out a clean cutting board and a knife for chopping. When she rolled the onion out of its bag, Aoi caught it before it could tumble away and asked, “Diced? Whole thing or just half?”

She used a finger to flip back to the right page and trace down the ingredients list. “Half,” she said with a smile.

Aoi had barely gotten a bite into the skin with the blade before she gave a great gasp.

“Don’t hold it like that, you could cut your fingers!” she scolded, taking the knife from his grip. She rested her left hand with her fingers curled, so that her knuckles were closest to the knife’s edge as she sliced through the middle. “Like this. It’s safer.”

Aoi wrinkled his nose. “So I can chop off even more’a my fingers if I miss, not just the tips?”

“It puts your fingers all in a straight line.” She held up her hand and traced the curve of her fingertips, then the line across her knuckles when she folded her hand back into a fist. “See?”

He nodded dumbly and wondered where he had learned to cut vegetables, whether it was something he had learned from someone special in a time before he could really remember, or it was one of those things he made up as he was going until he forgot that he never knew what he was doing in the first place.

Mrs. Field started stripping the layers of dry skin off of the onion’s surface with a smile. “It’s so nice to have you here, Aoi,” she sighed. “Light seems… happier with you around. He’s more lively than I’ve seen him in a long time.”

He nodded dumbly again. This information rattled in his head before he silently slid it into the garbage like onion skins off of the cutting board.

“Maybe he’s needed a brother like you.”

That one stung inside his nose and made his eyes water in a way he really did not like, or maybe that was the onions again.

Once Mrs. Field had returned to her own chopping, satisfied with his technique as he started slicing, he set the knife down and switched back to his previous grip, then to hers, then back. He had his fingers curled enough that his fingertips were in the same even line as they were when he gripped with his knuckles.

He missed the thumping on the stairs. He did not hear Light until he was in the entry to the kitchen, wearing a grimace on his face and a blanket on his shoulders. “Mom,” he whined, “there is absolutely no reason I should be able to fall asleep fully dressed under two blankets and subsequently wake up from feeling too cold.”

“Aoi’s here, Light,” Mrs. Field said with a smile.

The sudden brightness in Light’s face was another strange reality shortly thereafter tossed into the garbage. So was the way Light strode across the floor just to stand next to him once the sound of the knife against the cutting board revealed his location.

“Aoi, can you help him with the thermostat?” Mrs. Field asked. “Don’t worry about the onions, I’ll—”

“Mom, please, I can operate a thermostat,” Light interrupted with a sour look. “I still have _one_ hand left.”

His blanket cape billowed out behind him when he stormed out of the kitchen. Aoi shot glances at Light’s back and down at his onion and then at Mrs. Field when she said, “Aoi, don’t let him turn it above 23 degrees,” and then he was following Light.

With a casual touch, Light trailed his fingers along the wall on the other side of the kitchen, his body at an angle to give a wide berth to the waist-high rack of dishtowels and napkins in his path. His fingertip bumped the rectangle of plastic jutting out from the wall. He mapped out the keys with a downward stroke of his hand over the face of the thermostat, then honed in on the button with a little up-arrow engraved in the rubber.

Aoi slid his hand up under Light’s palm and pulled him away before he could press the key even once. Light stirred.

“It’s already at 23,” Aoi mumbled.

Light’s blanket began to slide off of his left shoulder when he huffed out a sigh. Then he pursed his lips, wrinkled his nose, and bumped up the temperature to 24 degrees anyway. The mischievous smirk he gave when the deed was done, and the speed with which he bolted for the staircase afterwards as if he had committed a true misdemeanor with this small act of defiance, made Aoi snort and run along in pursuit. It was the closest he had come to smiling all day.

Light fell back onto his bed, curling the blankets around himself, and stuffed his head into the pillow. Aoi eyed his own cot, at the thick blanket halfway draped over it. “You want the other blanket back?” he asked quietly, already beginning to gather it up in his arms.

“If I were interested in solving this problem with more blankets, I know where to procure another,” Light said. “It’s the principle of the thing.”

Light argued with his mother for the sake of arguing. Aoi had tried to ask him about it, but they barely could hold out a conversation when Aoi’s words kept getting swallowed back down again every time that sick something-like-guilt stuffed up his throat. She was domineering, controlling, Light had tried to explain, and Light toed her lines to keep her reins from growing tighter. She babied him, treated him like a fragile doll just because he had lost his eyes and an arm and maybe a little bit of his mind. Desperate to prove himself, he wanted none of her support. But she loved him so, so very much, and Aoi hurt with jealousy when he saw it in her eyes, and it broke his heart when Light spurned her affection.

He could not look her in the eyes. He was scared he might find that same love growing in her eyes when she looked at him, now. There was something traitorous in that, the same way there was something traitorous in the way Clover trailed him around with smiles and asked him to help her with her reading homework and tried to play with his hair when he sat too close to her.

“Are… are we brothers?” Aoi asked, hugging the blanket to his chest.

Light sighed. “We might _become_ brothers, legally,” he explained, “so that my mother can claim custody of you. She’d be able to write you off as a tax benefit that way, and I’m sure it would be easier for you to re-enroll in school if you had a legal guardian.”

There was the guilt in his throat again. He was a strain on their finances. They intended to send him to school, where he would just take up space rather than earn a wage.

He threw the blanket over Light and thought about running away again, until Light sat suddenly upright and called his name. He stopped exactly midstride, staring down at his unmoving feet. He wondered whether he could stop existing if he willed it enough.

“Aoi,” Light said again.

His balance was wavering. He drew one foot back to keep a more stable stance.

“You know you can talk to me about anything,” Light said softly, “right?”

Aoi hugged his elbows. His eyes caught on Light’s hand moving towards the foot of his bed, gesturing at him to sit.

“S’hard to talk,” he managed to say through the something stuffing up his airways.

Light patted at his mattress again.

Of everyone in this house trying uncomfortably hard to make Aoi feel at home, Light was the only one with whom Aoi felt at ease. Where Clover played sister, and Mrs. Field tried to play mother, Light was never brother, Aoi thought. But he shared his room, and his secrets, and his love in a way that mere friends did not.

Aoi stared at his feet as he took the seat Light offered him. Light’s fingertips feathered at his back, testing the waters for touch. Aoi stiffened, but remained still. Light’s hand felt stiff against his shoulder blades, too.

He had once had a mother. He had once had a little sister. He had never had a brother. Maybe he just did not know what it was supposed to feel like. Maybe this something new was just brotherhood.

There was a beam of sunlight from the window where the curtain was not fully drawn. It streaked over the angles of Light’s face, from his fine hair in a tousle from his blankets, through the right of his serene eyes, making his fair lashes glow, across his thin nose, bumping along his calm, patient lips, down to his jaw and then his neck.

Aoi shuddered away from Light’s hand. Light pulled his arm back to his lap.

“We ain’t brothers, are we?” Aoi breathed.

Light curled his legs closer to his chest. “What do you want us to be?” he asked.

Aoi scooted about a foot higher up on the bed. He brought his legs up, then leaned back.

Light shifted to make more room on his twin mattress. He lifted up the corner of his blanket like an invitation, or maybe a question. When Aoi slid underneath, Light lowered his arm back down, keeping its weight on Aoi’s chest. He was sharp angles against Aoi’s body, joints and bones, but he was warm in the middle. Though the sunbeam had left his face, Aoi’s eyes did not. He watched Light’s closed eyes stir with lazy little twitches like blinks, watched a lock of his hair tumble across his forehead as he turned, watched his lips lift into a soft smile, watched his lips, watched his lips, watched his lips.

He raised a slow, trembling hand to Light’s cheek. At the first contact between his chilly fingers and Light’s cool cheek, he felt a reciprocal grip on his shirt sleeve, slowly growing tighter. Light leaned closer.

As hard and angular as his body was, his lips were so soft. Aoi had never expected kissing to feel so nice, to be something he would just want to lie here and do again and again, as long as Light would let him. With every touch, he felt the brittle armor around his body smoldering and disintegrating. He was growing lighter as he shed this layer he no longer needed to protect himself. His new armor was the arm around his shoulders, the hand against his cheek, the warmth against his chest.

“Let’s… tell my mother we’re just brothers,” Light whispered with a nervous smile when they both gasped for the air that their suddenly pounding hearts were demanding.

In lieu of a verbal response, Aoi tucked himself into Light’s chest, face against his collarbone, arms wound tight around his chest, legs tangled. The pounding from Light’s ribs was not as fast as the pulsing Aoi felt in his ears. Now that he was not kissing Light, it felt like a mistake to have done it at all, and yet he still wanted to do it again.

Light ran a gentle hand down his back. “I know things are a bit of a mess right now,” he murmured. “If you want to take this all back tomorrow, it’s okay. I… want to be your friend no matter what.”

Aoi clutched his back and nodded. If he tried to speak, he was not sure he could keep from crying.

“You should really sleep,” Light said. “Mom is right about that, at the very least. You haven’t slept well.”

He did not loosen his grip.

“Oh, don’t do that. You’re encouraging my terrible sleep schedule.”

With slow reluctance, his grip slackened.

Light kept his arm firm against Aoi’s back when he tried to pull away. “I’m kidding,” he said. “I’ll stay. If it’ll help.”

Aoi muffled his words with Light’s shirt. “Sometimes I hear her when I’m alone.”

“What does she say?” Light asked.

“Nothin’.” He swallowed. “Just screams.”

There was a soft breath in his hair, and then the warmth of a kiss. “I’ll stay,” he promised.

Something about these little moments had always been tinged with something black, where every ounce of happiness was weighed down by a pound of guilt, for those he now burdened, for the one he had left behind. He remembered someone telling him that Akane would want him to find new happiness. It was not quite that he did not believe it, but that he did not believe he would ever find happiness again, so the point was moot.

When his thoughts turned to his sister, it was not her fright, her tears, her cries for help. It was her smile, her laughter, her memory. Lying under three blankets with a friend or something else, wrapped in warmth and love, he found the start of his new happiness.


End file.
